Next week’s meeting of the G20, hosted by Indonesia, will feature discussions on climate change and the need to accelerate the global energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Jakarta is also expected formally to announce that it’s joining the Just Energy Transition Partnership, a multibillion-dollar G7 initiative led by the US, France, Germany, the UK and the EU that’s designed to assist emerging economies with accelerating their transitions to renewables.

The expansion of the partnership to include Indonesia (South Africa joined last year) reflects the G7’s concern that the Paris climate agreement’s targets won’t be achieved without major financing and other support for the energy transition in emerging markets. But it also reflects the group’s attempt to counter China’s increasing prominence in renewable energy investments, particularly in Asia.

China is the largest financer of renewable energy projects in the Indo-Pacific. More than half of its overseas energy investments under the Belt and Road initiative, amounting to US$20 billion in 2020, are in the renewables sector. This significant funding is critical to supporting the regional energy transition. But G7 leaders have also expressed concerns that Beijing will leverage this financing for political influence and strategic advantage, including by creating financial and technological dependence on China.

These concerns are heightened by China’s dominance of renewable energy products and control over the supply chains for rare-earth minerals and the processing capacity to produce them. The International Energy Agency estimates, for example, that China’s global share in all the key manufacturing stages of solar panels, which currently exceeds 80%, will rise to more than 95% in the coming years.

The country also produces about 85% of the world’s rare-earth oxides and about 90% of rare-earth metals, alloys and permanent magnets. And China has demonstrated its willingness to use its control of the supply chain in pursuit of its wider geopolitical interests, most notably in 2010 when in retaliation for a maritime dispute with Japan it restricted rare-earth mineral exports to that country.

China’s leverage is particularly pronounced in the Mekong region. Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam rely on hydroelectricity produced along the Mekong River system for more than 50% of their electricity production, and China is their main source of financing for hydropower dams. More importantly, though, China’s upstream dams increasingly enable it to control the flow of water to its downstream neighbours, where 60 million people depend on the Mekong for their livelihoods.

China has pledged to use the dams to ensure a more even distribution of water during dry and wet seasons. But recent analysis suggests that on at least one occasion, during the extreme drought affecting the region in 2019, it did not do so. At least one expert in the region saw China’s control of Mekong water during the drought as an act of political manipulation.

But it’s important to keep in mind that China’s energy investments are motivated by multiple, overlapping objectives, including to secure economic advantage, achieve energy security, build greater geopolitical influence and leverage, and reduce climate risks. All of these objectives are on display in the Mekong, including in the key role hydropower plays in China’s plan to become carbon-neutral by mid-century. Chinese objectives are also evolving. As Huong Le Thu has observed with respect to Beijing’s investments in the Mekong, ‘Energy security has become almost secondary as dams gain geopolitical in addition to economic importance.’

China’s financing of renewable energy projects in the Indo-Pacific has increased markedly, but the investments may not be delivering the broader political benefits one would expect. Despite significant recent investments in Indonesia, for example, a 2021 public opinion poll found that 60% of Indonesians agreed that ‘Indonesia should join with other countries to limit China’s influence’, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2011. A recent survey of Southeast Asian elites found that China was the most distrusted power in the region. Similarly, public opinion surveys in other Asian subregions that have received significant Chinese investments, such as Central Asia, have noted a steady decrease in positive public sentiment towards China.

China’s multidimensional engagement in the region’s renewable energy systems has some important implications. One clearly positive implication is that Chinese domestic and regional investments in renewable energy are a fundamentally important contribution to efforts to prevent dangerous climate change. Indeed, it will be impossible to achieve the objectives in the Paris agreement without China’s financing, support and engagement.

Both the Covid-19 crisis and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine have starkly demonstrated the importance of securing critical supply chains. In this respect, China’s domination of the renewable energy market is a significant risk. And that risk may be growing; for example, recent reporting suggests that China sees Russia’s disruption of gas supplies to Europe as a major opportunity for China’s wind and solar energy firms to expand their European markets and presence.

There are at least two dimensions to the supply-chain risk. The first is the opportunity it affords China to leverage its control over resources and technologies to extract geopolitical concessions from its competitors or adversaries, as it attempted to do with Japan in 2010. The second is the exposure and vulnerability of China’s own domestic renewable energy infrastructure to disasters that are rapidly intensifying due to climate change, which is a risk China itself should seek to reduce. As the International Energy Agency has observed:

Today, China’s Xinjiang province accounts for 40% of global polysilicon manufacturing. Moreover, one out of every seven [solar] panels produced worldwide is manufactured by a single facility. This level of concentration in any global supply chain would represent a considerable vulnerability; solar PV is no exception.

Clearly, it must be a high priority for Australia and like-minded countries to diversify the renewable energy supply chain as rapidly as possible. China is playing the pivotal role in the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, including in the Indo-Pacific. Australia and its allies must find ways to engage with China in accelerating the transition to reduce the increasing risk of catastrophic climate change. Identifying opportunities to do so at a time when China is increasingly challenging the geostrategic order, and without undermining other important interests, is an urgent, daunting and fundamentally important task. As the Brookings Institution recently observed concerning the US and China:

The relationship remains too consequential to people in both countries and the rest of the world to be guided by a fatalistic acceptance of deepening enmity. And while competition resides at the core of the relationship, it is a mistake to view the relationship solely through the lens of rivalry. Doing so limits tools available to Washington for developing a more durable, productive relationship that serves America’s interests.

In 2018, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong predicted that in a little over a decade the ASEAN economy will become the world’s fourth largest, behind only the US, China and that of the European Union.

Lee has good reason for such optimism. The ASEAN region is already home to four of the world’s fastest growing economies. The Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative, which includes the construction of land routes (the Silk Road Economic Belt) and sea routes (the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road), is providing global economic opportunities, including access to markets through faster, more secure and more affordable transportation. In parallel, the comprehensive and ambitious blueprint for realising the ASEAN Economic Community promotes the increasingly free flow of goods, services, investments and skilled labour.

Unfortunately, while the momentum of the ASEAN economic integration agenda has increased since the publication of the ASEAN political-security community blueprint 2025, security integration hasn’t kept pace.

The ASEAN ‘single window’ harmonisation of national trade and customs procedures along regional air, sea and land routes is increasing the velocity at which people and goods move across international borders within the region. At the same time, the numbers of people and volumes of goods crossing those borders continue to rise, and the traditional approaches to border management applied by most member states are no longer able keep pace.

Collectively, these factors are substantially reducing the effectiveness of national border management controls, which in turn is creating new security vulnerabilities.

A vital and increasingly important response to this challenge has been the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Border Liaison Office (BLO) program. The BLO program was established under the auspices of the Regional Programme for Southeast Asia and the Pacific 2014–2017. Through this initiative, BLO officials are provided with training, tools, systems and equipment to improve border management and cross-border cooperation.

The BLO network currently consists of 70 offices located strategically at major crossing points along international land borders in the Mekong region. The offices are responsible for facilitating and promoting cross-border law enforcement collaboration, including operational coordination and information and intelligence sharing. Over recent years, the BLO network has made significant contributions to the disruption of illicit supply chains and transnational serious and organised crime syndicates.

Given the success of the program to date, and the significance of the region’s transnational threats, Australia should now focus on how we might support the continued development of the BLO program.

While much of Australia’s operational law enforcement success in the region can be attributed to strong police-to-police cooperation, it has also been highly effective at promoting multilateral law enforcement cooperation and capacity development. The Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC) has been invaluable to these broader regional engagement efforts.

JCLEC was created by Canberra and Jakarta in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombing investigation by the Indonesian National Police (POLRI), which exposed weaknesses in Indonesia’s capacity to investigate and disrupt terrorist networks. In 2004, the Australian Federal Police and POLRI agreed to establish a joint training school to enhance Indonesia’s capacity to respond to transnational crime and terrorism. From the beginning, JCLEC was focused on regional issues.

For 13 years, JCLEC has been a regional rallying point for much-needed counterterrorism capacity development and cooperation. More than 24,000 officials from 70 countries have trained at the centre since 2004. The capacity of many ASEAN police forces to undertake complex terror and criminal investigations has been dramatically improved by JCLEC training.

Australia should now consider the creation of a regional border management training hub, similar to JCLEC, to support the BLO program and regional cooperation. This training hub should be viewed as a regional activity that builds on the success of JCLEC.

The hub should be established in a Mekong state, given the number and length of land borders in that region. Thailand would be a strong contender because of its government’s continued focus on border management in the region.

The hub’s focus should be on border management and the promotion of border security cooperation. The curriculum would need a strong focus on the delivery of training on the planning and conduct of border operations. Courses would also need to be concentrated on enhancing the capacity of participants to identify and interdict the illegal movement and trafficking of people, narcotic drugs and precursor chemicals, wildlife, timber and counterfeit goods.

Importantly, the hub could also—like JCLEC—play a critical role in gathering together regional partners to create the low-key informal relationships of trust that make cooperation possible.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade should also consider supporting the BLO program as part of its official development aid investment in countering transnational crime in Southeast Asia. This investment should, as a priority, look to develop border management information-sharing capabilities, such as ICT infrastructure, in the Mekong region.

Cross-border or intra-regional cooperation in ASEAN is hampered by the stark differences in border management capacity across the region. As ASEAN continues to reach consensus on economic integration, this issue will need to be addressed through common minimum border management standards.

Now is a perfect time for Australia to offer practical support to increase regional border management cooperation before further regional security vulnerabilities are created.

Asia’s future is inextricably tied to the Himalayas, the world’s tallest mountain range and the source of the water-stressed continent’s major river systems. Yet reckless national projects are straining the region’s fragile ecosystems, resulting in a mounting security threat that extends beyond Asia.

With elevations rising dramatically from less than 500 metres to over 8,000 metres, the Himalayas are home to ecosystems ranging from high-altitude alluvial grasslands and subtropical broadleaf forests to conifer forests and alpine meadows. Stretching from Myanmar to the Hindu Kush watershed of Central Asia, the Himalayas play a central role in driving Asia’s hydrological cycle and weather and climate patterns, including triggering the annual summer monsoons. Its 18,000 high-altitude glaciers store massive amounts of fresh water and serve in winter as the world’s second-largest heat sink after Antarctica, thus helping to moderate the global climate. In summer, however, the Himalayas turn into a heat source that draws the monsoonal currents from the oceans into the Asian hinterland.

The Himalayas are now subject to accelerated glacial thaw, climatic instability and biodiversity loss. Five rivers originating on the Great Himalayan Massif—the Yangtze, the Indus, the Mekong, the Salween and the Ganges—rank among the world’s 10 most endangered rivers.

From large-scale dam construction to the unbridled exploitation of natural resources, human activity is clearly to blame for these potentially devastating changes to the Himalayan ecosystems. While all the countries in the region are culpable to some extent, none is doing as much harm as China.

Unconstrained by the kinds of grassroots activism seen in, say, democratic India, China has used massive, but often opaque, construction projects to bend nature to its will and trumpet its rise as a great power. This includes a globally unmatched inter-river and inter-basin water-transfer infrastructure with the capacity to move over 10 billion cubic metres of water through 16,000 kilometres of canals.

China’s reengineering of natural river flows through damming—one-fifth of the country’s rivers now have less water flowing through them each year than is diverted to reservoirs—has already degraded riparian ecosystems and caused 350 large lakes to disappear. With these water-diverting projects increasingly focused on international, rather than internal, rivers—in particular, those in the Tibetan Plateau, which covers nearly three-quarters of the Himalayan glacier area—the environmental threat extends far beyond China’s borders.

And dams are just the beginning. The Tibetan Plateau is also the subject of Chinese geo-engineering experiments, which aim to induce rain in its arid north and northwest. (Rain in Tibet is concentrated in its Himalayan region.) Such activities threaten to suck moisture from other regions, potentially affecting Asia’s monsoons. Ominously, such experiments are an extension of the Chinese military’s weather-modification program.

Moreover, as if to substantiate the Chinese name for Tibet, Xizang (Western Treasure Land), China is draining mineral resources from this ecologically fragile but resource-rich plateau, without regard for the consequences. Already, copper-mine tailings are polluting waters in a Himalayan region sacred to Tibetans, which they call Pemako (Hidden Lotus Land), where the world’s highest-altitude major river, the Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans), curves around the Himalayas before entering India.

Last fall, the once-pristine Siang—the Brahmaputra’s main artery—suddenly turned blackish grey as it entered India, potentially because of China’s upstream tunnelling, mining or damming activity. The Chinese government claimed that an earthquake that struck southeastern Tibet in mid-November ‘might have led to the turbidity’ in the river waters. But the water had become unfit for human consumption long before the quake.

In any case, China is not letting up. It has, for example, eagerly launched large-scale operations to mine precious minerals like gold and silver in a disputed area of the eastern Himalayas that it seized from India in a 1959 armed clash.

Meanwhile, China’s bottled-water industry—the world’s largest—is siphoning ‘premium drinking water’ from the Himalayas’ already-stressed glaciers, particularly those in the eastern Himalayas, where accelerated melting of snow and ice fields is already conspicuous. Unsurprisingly, this is causing biodiversity loss and impairment of ecosystem services.

Across the Himalayas, scientists report large-scale deforestation, high rates of loss of genetic variability, and species extinction in the highlands. The Tibetan Plateau, for its part, is warming at almost three times the average global rate. This holds environmental implications that extend far beyond Asia.

The towering Himalayan Highlands, particularly Tibet, influence the northern hemisphere’s atmospheric-circulation system, which helps to transport warm air from the equator towards the poles, sustaining a variety of climate zones along the way. In other words, Himalayan ecosystem impairment will likely affect European and North American climatic patterns.

Halting rampant environmental degradation in the Himalayas is now urgent, and it is possible only through cooperation among all members of the Himalayan basin community, from the lower Mekong River region and China to the countries of southern Asia. To bring about such cooperation, however, the entire international community will have to apply pressure to rein in China’s reckless environmental impairment, which is by far the greatest source of risk.